Yes, but at the same time, there were points where I was in three concurrent discussions about magic, how restrictive races were to culture, and how to model technology improvements in the game at the same time.
The third one is really the topic of the thread, the magic part was just the ways in which elves, specifically, might include technology advancement through a re-thinking of ways in which to pseudo-industrialize using magical means. (And the nature of how hard-coded elven or goblin behavior is got shunted over
into this thread...)
... so... ummmm...
How 'bout that technology?
The last post on the topic explicitly seems to have been
As far as technological progress requiring you to assign a lot of dwarfs to do the same job until they figure out better methods of doing it: That already happens automatically, since the end result is going to be a lot of dwarfs with high levels of skill.
I don't think it illustrates intuitive leaps, and I think it would replace micro-detail (which places a greater burden on the modder than on the player) with increased
micromanagement, of precisely the "migrant wave job pool" variety the game is currently struggling with.
I'd like to see technological improvement be a process of gathering low level resources, using them to survive, make crude tools, and construct low level buildings, then using your new tools and buildings to create mid-level resources that work better and help you survive more easily, until you reach a point where you can start devoting more and more resources towards tasks that you don't absolutely need for daily survival, towards making increasingly refined tools, and more elaborate installations and complexes of related buildings, which you then use to build and refine various niceties of civilization you don't absolutely *need*, and continue following first just one or two, then several, paths of increased specialization and decreased necessity, until you've clearly reached a sophisticated state.
Well... I think it just needs to have a better way of representing the learning leaps and technology upgrades.
That is, rather than just having skill upgrades, it could somehow fine-tune exactly what it is they are getting better at, or how they have learned to add a trick to their workshops at a micro-level in a way that doesn't overly disturb the macro-level actions of the player. (I actually kind of think letting modders have a fine-toothed brush over what a tech level upgrade does in a workshop might actually be a positive for most modders...)
(If we tie migrant job skill levels to civ-wide tech levels, then exporting tech bonuses would theoretically improve the migrants of that class you have that come back to you...)
I've actually really wanted to go back to refining the Class Warfare suggestion thread after getting involved in this... need to kick up the will to just finish writing it out rather than just chew through what I want to say in my head over and over. I think that the way that management and organization of dwarves in that concept works out can combine with the "technology" improvements pretty well...
Part of the reason why I made the whole Class Warfare thread in the first place was to create a much greater internal set of stresses inside the fortress, itself, since currently, your fortress has no real stress beyond immediate satiation of physical needs and physical safety. Class Warfare's whole purpose is to add social and psychological aspects to the game that actually justify a lot of the later-game improvements that can be done beyond merely surviving, and to create the threat of collapse from within by creating things like feuding families of dwarves or cloak-and-dagger politics for power and position within a fortress that make even a totally isolated and self-sustaining fortress capable of crumbling from internal pressures rather than worrying solely about external threats.
(I started the whole thread when I realized none of the mods and suggestions relating to dwarves having nicer stuff would ever matter if they never wanted or needed anything more than just enough to not die or not go crazy from sadness.)
Hence, part of "winning the game" (or at least, advancing through it) means that you have a gradually ramping-up difficulty as you start actually needing certain things you didn't need before when you hit milestones in fortress development. (Sort of like how the old 2d game started ramping up difficulty as you crossed the three barriers of the underground river, chasm, and magma river.) Getting to different stages of fortress development is rewarded with more prestige as you get things like nobles and an economy with your dwarves wanting to buy goods from your fort, but that at the same time, the game is harder because now you have more demands to supply.
Hence, technology, at this point, would be seen as more along the lines of its own ends, existing to be explored just for its own sake, but we can produce some different ends, some different challenge to overcome, to which this technology improvement would be the means to overcome it. That is, if you ever want to get to kingdom mode by attracting the king, you have to develop enameled metalworking or porcelain manufacturing or velvet-covered golden throne production. When you get the king, you open up the option to start ordering the dwarven armies around on the world map in kingdom mode.
... and that was the one that spurred me on to resurrecting the Class Warfare thread...
That is, I think that technology can be used as part of a difficulty-scaling mechanism, where the game may be in some ways much harder when it's more developed.
Or, in other words, in our simple, basic level game we have now, there's no challenge but immediate survival. Your points about technology basically just making doing something we can already do a little bit better when, in order to get there, we already had to be able to do it well enough to survive in the first place, is a valid point, and that the way that I'm thinking of making that work is to just make something else that ramps up the challenge as time goes on.
On the most immediate and obvious level, there is the external threat level. That is, the more technologically advanced your fortress starts out at, the more technologically advanced the goblins may be, as well. They may just plain send more goblins or better armored goblins, or even better siege engines with better capacity to dig or bridge or knock down walls. That gives an impetus to climb up the technologically-available ladder quickly for the same reason that an RTS game will make you want to jump up the tiers of units you can produce.
The purpose of the class warfare stuff, however, is to also introduce internal stresses that make it so that even a secured fortress protected from external threats and capable of self-sustenance is still presented with a challenge from within. Basically, in the same way that vampires produce an internal threat, or the sometimes-suggested fortress thieves are a threat that can't be purely blocked at the gates, but requires the capacity to suss out information about your fortress's internal workings, and possibly undermine a fortress from within present a greater challenge to the player.
The further purpose is to make technologically-difficult-to-produce items like high-end trade crap actually useful by making those items used in pacifying increasingly difficult-to-pacify dwarves. That is, as you progress through the game to the point where external threats alone are no longer a challenge, the point is to make internal threats undermine your ability to always control your dwarves exactly how you want to, and make their own internal fortress lives more interesting.
Making clans of dwarves that feud and possibly even come to blows if you can't resolve the dispute peacefully means including an actual threat to fortress unity that isn't solvable strictly through walling off your fort or magma. (Well... you still
could give the Hatfield or McCoy family a collective Unfortunate Accident, I suppose, but you couldn't do it too often...)
Hence, you work on providing nicer amenities to dwarves than just bare-sustenance in order to keep the fissures between your dwarves from erupting into civil war.
This isn't entirely separate from the external threats, either - part of the point is that it makes your fortress more focused on solving internal conflicts than actually expanding, and as such, being able to mine and mechanize huge portions of the fortress to solve any problem you might face from an external threat automatically (such as obsidian-casting an FB or something).
I would also point to the older arguments relating to
rubble. Making the entire process of mining (and hence, expanding your fortress in general) slower and involving more labor means that the internal stresses have more impact on your capacity to fully excavate the entire map. (I would also honestly just prefer a smaller map - I use a single cavern layer all the time, and feel there is no loss of gameplay from cutting the number of z-levels rendered in half. The supposed increase in challenge is non-existant since I just wall off the caverns, and go straight for the magma sea, anyway. I routinely have magma forges within my first year. Making the stairwells/pump stacks twice as long isn't really anything but a nuisance.)
Adding to that the challenges of more complex farming, and you can start having internal stresses that seriously sap the strength of a fortress before an external threat ever arrives.
Therefore, I think the way to make the rising tech levels make sense is to basically revisit the old notion of increasing challenge that spurs the player to have to develop their fortress more thoroughly as time goes on. (And go beyond just the "learning cliff" in difficulty.)
Hence, I will go back to what I was saying about having "technology" that your fortress possesses that not only reflects your own ability, as a player, to actually build public works projects like pump stacks to move water around, but also to a sense of the "skill level" your entire fortress has developed through the use of specific dwarves' skills. (That is, the total amount of metalworking experience your fortress has.)
If you start having things like moving from plain steel to Fine Dwarven Steel to Exceptional Dwarven Steel, and then Nickeled-Steel or some pseudo-magical metals that give combat bonuses, and then have martial arts schools that train better warriors that develop new techniques that let dwarves better cleave off limbs or something, or the ability to develop armor for your trained beasts, or even a technological development for just plain farming more food from the same land to support more warriors in the field, you generate the scaling capacity for a fortress to meet a scaling threat.
If you expect half your "advances" to come from player skill, and the other half from just having better steel weapons, then scaling enemy strength is going to give you plenty of reason to keep pushing both players and their technologies for an edge, alike.
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Topic: Working through Medieval stasis (Read 31663 times)